[opencms-dev] Development cycle for enterprise applications using OpenCms

[Fredrik Andersson]

Hello!

I'm currently involved in building a web application and middleware-solution using OpenCms 6 and
JBoss AS 4. I have found it a little difficult to merge the perspectives of the content management
development cycle represented by OpenCms and its on line workspace and the enterprise development
cycle I'd like to use for the middleware using tools such as CVS, Ant, Eclipse et al.

Ideally I would like to get everything (opencms webapp including our modules, middleware ejbs,
support libs etc) packaged into one single coherent EAR, in a development process where I can work
locally, deploying against my own JBoss/Tomcat/DB and then deploy it to a test/production machine
when it's time for a release.

The main problem I think I have is handling undeployment/redeployment of OpenCms in such a scenario.
If I package a "vanilla" opencms.war in the EAR I guess I will have to go through the setup each
time i deploy which is of course too time consuming. Can you do the setup once and then repackage
the opencms.war with the configuration and make it work?

My vision is to have all our OpenCms modules and templates available as version controlled files in
the file system together with the rest of the source as well as configuration settings for the
different environments that the product will be hosted in. The synchronization between the VFS and
the real file system in OpenCms is of course helpful, but I feel that maybe more is needed to make a
complete repeatable build system (even if you can automate it with Ant).

Any suggestions from the developer community on this? Am I aiming too high or making things harder
than they should be? Is there some recommended compromises that I can make?




Thanks!

/Fredrik